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Month: November 2012

First secure our financial future. Investment and property. But then it’s time to have a little fun – perhaps schedule a few air drops of 1lb packages of bacon throughout the middle east.

This arises from a conversation over the holiday weekend. We were talking about Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and all those countries and Islam in general. And as we all know, Islam also has a prohibition on pork products too.

So a few aircraft full of it and just drop it all over those countries. Maybe Indonesia too.

On the one hand, I find this to be very gracious on the part of the President to even give Mitt Romney a hearing.

Do you really think Willard Mitt Romney can add anything to the political reality in the United States? I don’t. Romney offered no new ideas to move us forward as a nation. So the reality of course is that this is purely symbolic.

Though I would like to be a fly on the wall for this lunch meeting. There won’t be any press allowed which I find really interesting. Perhaps Mitt Romney will me marched out in cuffs and sent to Guantanamo? Nah, that’s just fantasy on my part.

Outstanding performances by Daniel Day Lewis as President Lincoln, Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln and even Tommy Lee Jones as Rep. Thaddeus Stevens.

Movie spoiler – it picks up in 1865, the forth year of the U.S. Civil War. By this point in time the north is taking the lead and a peace is eminent and reconstruction can begin.

It focuses on the life, as gleaned through historical record, of the decision to push the 13th Amendment and to negotiate a peace with the Confederacy.

The political push-pull is extremely interesting. Not only that back in the mid 19th century the Republicans were actually the progressive party. Imagine that. Now of course it’s the complete opposite.

The focus on one Representative, Thaddeus Stevens a supporter of ending slavery for the past 30 years of his career in the House, we find out WHY he supported it near the very end of the movie.

One other thing, the political environment back then was almost a contact sport. I love it!

We thought we’d catch the 7:05PM show on Friday evening. By the time we arrived it had been sold out. There was a 9:45PM and 10:15PM showing but even the 9:45PM was sold out. So we got in on the 10:15PM showing. It’s a fairly long movie, some 150 minutes (2 and a half hours) but well worth watching.

And it I’ve heard folks say the timing of this was delayed to counter the fact that the Republicans were actually the good guys back in the mid to later 19th century. But I think it’s perfect timing what with the threats to secede by the likes of Texas and a handful of other states. Even here in RI we got 4,550 signatures to secede and I bet I know where they all came from, the towns of East Greenwich and part of North Kingstown. They think their shit doesn’t stink.

Yes indeed – Christianity is sliding down that slippery slope. A friend of mine says that what we are witnessing is the dying gasps of organize religion.

But granted, it’s going to take a long time for it to completely fade away.

Why else would the likes of the Pope, and leaders of the Southern Baptists, and evangelicals keep saying such ridiculous things? Because they know they’re losing the battle.

Part of it is a function that traces back to the invention of the printing press. Of course we’ve taken that to an extreme, I can publish this without anything more than a swype or press of keys on my phone or computer.

So it’s really a function of education, which is why you’re seeing attacks on things like evolution because the religious know they cannot legitimately argue against it. So they came up with creation ‘science’.

And of course there’s the deliberate dumbing down of our educational system in general. I was at the forum for potential school board candidates and I said, I want every student in the Providence school system to get the education I got, and mine wasn’t in public schools.

But even with those attacks we’re still making progress. It is because we have this thing that I alluded to earlier, the internet. A multitude of search engines, Web 2.0 sites, etc. It heterodynes the message that directly disputes the claims of the religious.

Pierce is yet another Bell Labs legend among the likes of Claude Shannon, Nyquist et al who are kind of integral to my I.T. career and to my interest in communication networks, from the wired to wireless.

He is one of the fathers of satellite telecommunications. Should be an interesting read.